Iowa not so hot for Obama these days

posted at 12:00 pm on February 19, 2012 by Jazz Shaw

The current state of play in Iowa may be something of a mixed bag for many of you. There’s good news, not so good news and, frankly… kind of weird news. Barack Obama carried Iowa by nearly 10% in 2008. So it should provide a cheerful note for the GOP hopefuls to learn that three of the remaining four top tier contenders lead the President in head to head match-ups in the latest polling there. But who does the best?

President Barack Obama trails three of the four Republican candidates in head-to-head match-ups if the election were held today, according to a new Iowa Poll.

The president defeats only Newt Gingrich, 51 percent to 37 percent.
Iowa is considered a swing state in the general election, critical to Obama’s re-election or victory by the Republican nominee.

So apparently Iowa has caught the fevah, and the only cure is… Ron Paul.

This comes as something of a surprise, considering recent news items providing more positive news for the President. Fox has already reported that Obama has been ticking upward in the swing states, and there’s been a relentless media narrative about how happy days are here again, good times are just around the corner and – very likely – that oceans levels have indeed begun to fall. Is Iowa some sort of harbinger of things to come, even before the expected change in unemployment trends?

Clearly, Ron Paul is overperforming with independents and disheartened Democrats, while lagging badly with the base. Either way, though, it still appears that Obama is facing an uphill battle here unless Newt somehow makes a third comeback.

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Most Iowans really don’t care about ethanol subsidies – certainly not enough to base their votes on a politician’s stance on the issue.

steebo77 on February 19, 2012 at 12:16 PM

Dunno about that. I grew up and was educated there. Practiced in the Marion area for about 20 years. Much of the economy is trickle down from agiculture, especially in the smaller towns. Seven dollar corn has led to five thousand dollar/acre farmland and continued sales of three hundred thousand dolar combines.

came across this report recently, the headline and some of the wording is inflammatory, but the report seems to be accurate and shows deep extensive ties between Ron Paul and neo-nazis/white supremacists that go back decades:

Ron Paul will balance the budget in his first term, cutting $1 Trillion in his first year in office. If you care about fiscal issues this is a simple choice.

rndmusrnm on February 19, 2012 at 12:08 PM

Hint: It’s not his fiscal ideas that people here have trouble accepting. It’s his through-and-through insane foreign policy, as well as the fact that he’s a nationwide fundraising poison. Losing all the banking money contributions right after Obama gave them up by supporting OWS is would be a byotch.

also, due to the hacking group anonymous hacking a notorious white supremacist website, information has come out, that not only has Ron Paul had various meetings with their board of directors, but his campaign chairs in places like Chicago, are white supremacists:

Losing all the banking money contributions right after Obama gave them up by supporting OWS is would be a byotch.

Let’s deal with this one first:

You are asking this party and this movement to sell out a principled candidate because the banksters, the corporate hoodlums who gambled away their stockholders money and then went to DC and had their mouthpieces cry economic apocalypse if Congress and the Fed didn’t rescue their hides with multi-trillion dollar bailouts, won’t pony up to him?

With all due respect, f**k that!

It’s not his fiscal ideas that people here have trouble accepting. It’s his through-and-through insane foreign policy,

I’m willing to bet that you stood an cheered during GWB’s second inaugural, when he laid out a vision of US foreign policy… well, let’s see what he said…

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

With all due respect, f**k that!
JohnGalt23 on February 19, 2012 at 12:45 PM

I’d join the f**k enthusiastically but the conservatives do need the Senate and the House to change anything – and both will, unfortunately, be lost without said money (or worse, with said money flowing to the other side). It’s a sucky system that has nothing to do with true personal liberty but that’s the reality we happen to live in.

Who exactly is engaging in delusional foreign policies?
JohnGalt23 on February 19, 2012 at 12:45 PM

Ron Paul is. Have you ever been to the Middle East? I happened to live there for a decade, served in the IDF, and have witnessed first-hand what kind of atrocities devoted muzzies are capable of. We can bend over backwards but until we give up wine and bacon and start turning eastward for a daily prayer we’ll have no friends there.

It does seem like he’s the only one of the four candidates with a sense of humor. I think it’s probably because he doesn’t have to worry about keeping track of all the lies and false promises he’s made to various special interests groups and can just be himself, rather than a calculated fiction like the others.

The GOP is a jalopy. A jalopy held together with duct tape, old parts cannibalized off other jalopy’s, and weathered rusty original parts that barely function. It squeaks, rattles, rumbles, hisses, overheats every time it hits the road, and it emits a lot of foul exhaust. It can still get from Point-A to Point-B but it takes 5x as long to get there and has to drive on the shoulder of the road because it is such a discombobulated mess and moves so slow that it is a traffic hazard.

I live in Wenatchee, Washington state, where they built an expensive stadium several years ago in spite of overwhelming public opposition. They shoved it down our throats then and now that the stadium is about to bankrupt the city they are shoving tax increases down our throats, and not just the cities throats, but the surrounding counties that didn’t have any say in stadium whatsoever. They are supposed to put tax increases to a public vote but they would lose big time so instead they are trying to pass a law that will let the city increase our taxes by dictate.

This is a red area of the state, BTW, and I hope that even the red areas up here, (the eastern half of the state), will give Ron Paul a victory.

DEDICATIONDedicated to all those Jews in pre-Nazi Germanywho believed that Hitler was no threat and that theGerman people were too civilized to send them todeath camps. Dedicated to all the Jews in the UnitedStates who believe that because Ron Paul has a littlechance of being elected President he is no threat toAmerican Jewry. Dedicated to those fools won’t don’tbelieve another Holocaust can happen here or inIsrael.Cover art by Nick Apuzzo, Occupy Oakland.Research by Aron Morton Kay, Occupy Wall Street.

The problem with Ron Paul is that he doesn’t understand the responsibilities attached to hegemony and the consequences of neglecting those responsibilities. The United States cannot simply throw up its hands and say “We’re done!” to the rest of the world and expect everything to be honkey-dorey. At the very least, it would create a power vacuum that would dwarf the vacuum we created by eliminating the Columbian Cartels that led to the rise of the Mexican Cartels (we all know how that’s working out), plus, a return to isolationism wouldn’t exactly cause Al Qaeda, Iran, Hezbollah, et cetera to say “okay!” and move on to other targets. Although I agree that we should scale back our involvement in international affairs, I believe we should do so to allow us to focus on defending and promoting our interests without wasting precious resources doing things like fighting Europe’s wars (Kosovo, Libya).

His associations with white supremacists are troubling, but also explained reasonably by the strategy of paleo-libertarianism as promoted by Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard in the 1990s, that sought to incorporate other fringe movements into libertarianism in an attempt to build a viable voting base. I read an article somewhere written by a member of the Libertarian Party who was involved with that strategy which suggested that Ron Paul was involved, but that it doesn’t reflect racial views on his part. Whether or not that’s a huge deal to you is up to you, to me, it isn’t.

Besides, if associations are anything, than Obama’s association with known terrorist Bill Ayers should make him unelectable. Apparently, liberals don’t care if their candidate is in bed with a murderer.

I assume it’s from Golum’s propaganda hit-piece? It insinuates that Hitler and Ron Paul are both comparable, ignoring the obvious fact that in reality they are polar opposites: Hitler was a big-government authoritarian while Ron Paul is a small government libertarian. If Ron Paul is like Hitler than so was George Washington, Jefferson and Franklin.

i fact checked most of their sourcing and it is extensive and clearly accurate from what i have seen, scroll on the bottom of the report and all the links are readily available, if you can tell me what in the report is untrue i would be welcome to hear it

I have a feeling that if the narrative was that Ron Paul was bigoted against Muslims, Catholics, Evangelicals, Mormons, Buddhists, Hindus, Confucians, or good ol fashion Pagans, you’d have no problem with him as long as he was pro-Israel. You’d have Ron Paul fever, too. Then Ron Paul’s character would be above reproach. So let’s just say your line of attack is motivated by a personal bias that has absolutely nothing to do with the issues at hand facing the country.

I think you’re probably a secret Ron Paul supporter only pretending to attack Ron Paul with such ridiculous, slanderous propaganda that it discredits people like you’re pretending to be.

FloatingRock on February 19, 2012 at 2:28 PM

I actually think that role is played by Rebar around here. I’ve often told him if I were to ever engage in sockpuppetry, I would model my sockpuppet on him, with the constant disprovable predictions that are often proven wildly off the mark.

. So let’s just say your line of attack is motivated by a personal bias that has absolutely nothing to do with the issues at hand facing the country.

keep the change on February 19, 2012 at 2:47 PM

ah yes, out comes the familiar anti-semitic tropes of the paulbots, i havn’t mentioned Israel on this thread, merely the fact that he has a long and illustrious career attaching himself top neo-nazis and white supremacists in America. Your response is that this concern makes me an “Isreal firster”, ok got you

I live in E WA as well. Paul has no chance of winning Washington. Maybe in the areas like Wenatchee, but not in the rest of E WA. We know what a loon he is.

Voter from WA State on February 19, 2012 at 5:20 PM

You will eventually like Ron Paul once he’s been president a while and the economic footing finally begins to firm. I’m sure it will be disappointing for people like you at first because you won’t be able to shove your agenda down everybody else’s throats but then I hope you’ll realize that nobody else is shoving their agenda down your throat either. Hopefully in time tensions will ease and people will start to get along and behave in a more traditionally American way instead of the European big-gov socialist/corporatist path we’re locked into now.

The Democrat and Republican parties, it’s like out of the frying pan and into the fire.

What the Republican establishment is saying, which includes the Rush Limbaugh, Bush wing as well as the NE country clubbers in NY and DC, is that we should jump out of the fire and into the frying pan. What I’m saying is that we need to jump out of the fire altogether and either vote for Ron Paul or else 3rd party, or possibly a reform ticket like DeMint/Paul or Palin/Paul, wherein the candidate at the top needs to be convincingly open to Ron Paul’s influence and try to compromise when possible. But then they didn’t run and Ron Paul did, and so it seems appropriate to me that he should be at the top of the ticket.

I was at the RP rally last night in KC. There were at least three thousand people there. The crowd was very diverse. This was done on 3 days notice and was not even posted on the campaign site. I doubt any of the other candidates could pull this off. No one is enthusiastic for the other candidates, they are just less bad than Obama.

Hint: It’s not his fiscal ideas that people here have trouble accepting. It’s his through-and-through insane foreign policy… Archivarix on February 19, 2012

But then you say…

Ron Paul is. Have you ever been to the Middle East? I happened to live there for a decade, served in the IDF, and have witnessed first-hand what kind of atrocities devoted muzzies are capable of. We can bend over backwards but until we give up wine and bacon and start turning eastward for a daily prayer we’ll have no friends there. Archivarix on February 19, 2012

Which is precisely why his foreign policy is correct. Remember the headlines last week ‘Saudi Arabia to buy nukes if Iran tests A-bomb’.

Never. The guy is totally looney when it comes to foreign affairs. When he said that Pres. Bush should be brought up on war crimes, he lost me forever. I wouldn’t vote for him even if he was the GOP candidate. I see him as bad as Obama.

Barack Obama carried Iowa by nearly 10% in 2008. So it should provide a cheerful note for the GOP hopefuls to lWiearn that three of the remaining four top tier contenders lead the President in head to head match-ups in the latest polling there.

With all due respect Jazz, I find nothing cheerful about those poll figures. That’s all???? So if any or all of them drop in the polls, Iowa votes for Obama? I thought Iowa was the home of the Conservatives, you know Bachmann/Santorum. The fact they supported B.O. in 2008 is bad enough and now the R’s are barely doing much better. They should be leading by many more points than that.

Among likely general-election voters in Texas, Santorum has the widest margin of victory over Barack Obama and the only one to win a majority, 51/37. Romney comes close at 49/36, as does Newt Gingrich (49/38). Native Texan Ron Paul only gets a 44/35 spread over Obama. The partisan D/R/I split in this poll is 35/33/29, for those keeping score.